Media content, such as advertisements, is created with the goal of having the content viewed, listened to, or otherwise received by a target audience. The target audience may be, for example, one or more users with a set of particular interests or one or more of users falling in a particular demographic or psychographic group. However, distributing such media content to the desired audience is a difficult process. It is often difficult for brand managers, ad networks, publishers, advertisers, and/or advertising agencies (collectively referred to herein as “advertisers”) to control and manage the service of their advertisements.
There is therefore a need in the art for approaches for controlling and managing the distribution of advertisements for publication on webpages and websites. These advertisers are concerned with fraud, where advertisements that have little to no potential of being viewed by a human user are served. More particularly, advertisers are concerned with webpages and/or websites that are engaging in monetizing fraud activities, such as click fraud, advertisement impression fraud, or other deceptive behavior. Click fraud generally relates to the imitation of a legitimate user of a web browser application clicking on or selecting an advertisement such that a payment for the selection is made without having an actual interest in the advertisement and/or with the objective of depleting advertising budgets. Impression fraud generally relates to falsely generating advertisement impressions that affect the advertiser (e.g., repetitive keyword searches without clicking a viewable advertisement, multiple advertisements are displayed in layers over each other where one advertisement is seen, but multiple impressions are reported, etc.). Yet another example of monetizing fraud includes false attribution, where credit for a conversion is given for a false advertisement impression or an advertisement that is never viewed.
Approaches for perpetrating these types of fraud can include the use of 1) botnet traffic, where non-human bots are used to view and click on advertisements, 2) iframe stuffing, where a webpage along with its advertisements are stuffed into a 1×1 pixel that is served on another website, and/or 3) ad stacking, where multiple advertisements are placed on top of one another in a single advertisement placement and where only the top advertisement is viewable by a user.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide methods, systems, and media that overcome these and other deficiencies of the prior art.